The marketization of teacher continuing professional development (BERA 2024)

In this conference paper we present a critical analysis of UK government policy for professional development in schools in England. Focussed on the delivery of government-funded National Professional Qualifications (NPQs), we argue that this market is dominated by a dense network whose key players act entrepreneurially to secure their position. We then argue further, using a conceptual framework developed by Evans (2014) which considers the behavioural, attitudinal and intellectual dimensions of learning, that this policy has stymied continuing professional development (CPD) of teachers and school leaders.     

The policy context is that in 2017 the Department for Education (DfE) launched NPQs in middle, senior and executive leadership, as well as a new NPQH for headteachers, to train school leaders in England. Delivery was through 41 accredited providers with £10m of funding available to schools in select areas (DfE 2021 p18-19). In 2021, DfE radically increased this investment to £184m for all schools to spend on six NPQs before naming nine lead providers including: The Ambition Institute, Education Development Trust, Harris Federation, Teach First and UCL Institute of Education.  This funding arrangement is up for renewal in 2024.

Furthermore, in 2022, Ministers announced that four multi-academy trusts (MATs) - Star Academies, Harris Federation, Outwood Grange Academies Trust and Oasis Community Learning - would run a National Institute of Teaching (NIoT) to deliver DfE’s “golden thread” (DfE 2022 p.5) of ‘world class teacher development’. The NIoT’s initial teacher training (ITT) role has attracted much analysis. Here we shift the scholarly debate to address their position as ‘flagship lead provider’ (DfE 2022 p.8) of NPQs. Our focus is on the impact of this centralization of teacher CPD. 

The first stage of our analysis was to conduct a mapping of those organisations delivering NPQs through a network analysis approach which has previously been deployed in thinking about education policy (Ball and Junemann 2012). As outlined in Innes, Gregory and Murtagh (BERA Blog, 2024), the NIoT MATs are also known as the School Led Development Trust.  Some of those trusts have ‘institutes’ or ‘leadership colleges’ to deliver NPQs which make up the School Led Network,(SLN), along with other partners. We highlight Harris Federation for example, as being both a lead provider of NPQs, part of the NIoT, as well as the Harris Leadership College being in the SLN. Other SLN members, such as STAR Institute, are also individually engaged in the process of creating empires of NPQ provision regionally through building teams of consultants. Outside of that immediate network, 87 ‘teaching school hubs’ are accredited by lead providers in order to access the market (DfE 2022 p.8). Such a powerful network requires investigation.

The second stage of our analysis therefore was to identify the positionality of these training providers. We argue using the framework and data generated from document analysis that the network of NPQ provision has led to a focus in teacher development on what Evans (2014) calls the ‘behavioural component of professionalism’, meaning that the focus is on the processes and procedures that people apply to their work resulting in output, productivity and achievement. This can be seen in the claims made of NPQs being ‘evidenced based’ and able to ‘produce’ leaders; as well as the spreading of NPQs into new areas including literacy and special educational needs provision. This is important, we argue, because such a functional focus is leading to a neglect of two key aspects of Evan’s (2014) framework for professional development: the ‘attitudinal’ and ‘intellectual’ (p.191). These two elements relate to teachers’ own self-perception, motivations, and analytical reasoning.

We conclude that the UK government has centralised teacher development in England by stealth, with the beneficiaries being privatized providers. While school hubs and lead providers may provide an illusion of local and regional provision, NPQs are a one-size-fits-all national solution driven by a neo-liberal ideal of privatisation and corporatization, which we argue creates standardisation driven by cost-effectiveness. This, we argue, is troubling given that over a decade ago, Evans (2014) called for the opposite to occur; asserting that ‘micro level professional development’ (p.186) is the key to improving teacher practice at all levels. 

We end by setting out a plan for a critical updating of this framework in light of current policy developments, and by outlining a research plan for empirical data gathering involving education professionals in the field to explore this issue further.